Most automobiles built these days have gauges that tell you what the cars fuel economy is; how many miles per gallon you’re getting; and so, the fuel gauge tells you how many miles you still have before the car is empty. I haven’t decided yet if that’s a good feature on my car or not. Few things cause an argument quicker in my household than when my wife gets into my car to go somewhere and finds the “low fuel” light on. My wife stops to fill up her truck when the gauge gets below half. Me, on the other hand, as much driving as I do for my work, I don’t want to waste time filling up all the time, so I stretch it out as long as possible. I have it down to a science. The “low fuel” light comes on, on my car when it still says 50 miles to empty, but at the point the light comes on it doesn’t tell you how many miles you have left, so then I find myself keeping a running calculation in my head; let’s see, the light came on about 20 miles ago, I’ve still got a good 25 miles.
But then every once in a while, I’ll find myself stuck in traffic, maybe on the Glenn Highway behind an accident, sitting there, watching the needle slowly touching the “E”. Then my prayer life dramatically increases, “Please Lord, let me make it back to Palmer.”
Today’s busy world tends to give us short vision when it comes to being prepared, but that’s what today’s readings challenge us to do; to think about being prepared. The parable, we hear from Jesus in today’s Gospel deserves a little explanation, because Jewish wedding customs in Christ’s time were quite different than what we are used to today. In today’s world, it’s usually the bride that’s the cause of a wedding starting late, and in some countries it’s even a custom for the bride to be a few minutes late for the wedding. But in Christ’s time, once a wedding was announced, it was the groom who controlled when it would occur, and it could happen anytime within about a two-week period, at the grooms choosing. So, the bride had to be in constant wait at her father’s house. The groom would usually give a little advance warning on the morning of the day he chose. He would then pick her up and take her back to his, or his parents’ house where the celebration would occur. The bridesmaids would wait at the groom’s house for the wedding party to arrive. But when the groom would pick up his bride, he would have to negotiate with her family the price he would pay or the gifts he would give them to be able to marry her. Sometimes these negotiations like in the parable of today’s Gospel, would take a long time. When the bride and groom finally reached the grooms house, the parents would pronounce a blessing over the happy couple and then the wedding feast would begin. The bridesmaids in the parable grew weary while waiting and fell asleep. They had been given the opportunity to be ready for the wedding. They knew it would take place. The only delay would be the negotiations with the brides’ relatives. Five of them were foolish and didn’t make the proper preparations, and so the wedding feast went on without them.
This reminds us that we make many choices every day going through life. There’s no getting away from it, we have to make decisions. The option we have is to choose wisely or choose badly. We only pass this way in life once, and whichever we choose, we have to live afterwards with the consequences of our choices. Yesterday morning I was out at the prison for service and when I was preaching about this, about paying the consequences for our actions, I suddenly realized where I was and who I was talking to, that I was singing to the choir.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether the choices we make every day are the wise choices, that prepare us for the arrival of the Groom, that prepare us for the wedding feast, the heavenly banquet. We don’t want to be like the five foolish bridesmaids who were caught unprepared. The last line of today’s Gospel warns us, “Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
The first Christians in the early Church, believed that Christ was returning very soon, and it was important to be ready. Well, he didn’t come back within their lifetime like they were expecting, but ever since then people have been trying to predict when Christ would return. That the end of the world would come at a particular day. Just in the past few decades there have been numerous predictions down to the day and even to the hour of when the world was to end. I think we just passed a week or two ago, the day that someone said the world was going to end. Now the next big prediction, I think, is June of next year, when the Mayan calendar comes to an end.
Our faith tells us that Christ will indeed return one day, and when that happens, there’ll be no more time to ask, “Am I ready?” And if Christ doesn’t come back within our lifetime, we must all still face the day of our own death, something most people try not to think about. But at the moment of our death, the time to prepare is over, and that too will come at a day and an hour we do not know. With the busyness of life, it’s easy to dismiss our mortality, and put off what should be our continuing preparation for the wedding banquet. It’s easy to disregard the interconnection of all our daily choices and not recognize the impact they have on our preparedness. We’re faced with a multitude of choices every day which may seem insignificant by themselves; however, they often add up to pointing us in particular directions, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
I know my wife is waiting for the day, the same day I dread, when I’ll be calling her to tell her I ran out of gas somewhere. “My lamp is out of oil. Can I borrow some?” I know I must work harder on being prepared, in all aspects of my life
So, how do we prepare ourselves? What are the choices we make every day? Are our decisions pointing us in the direction of making us ready? If we knew the day and the hour of our death, would we change anything in our lives? Would we go and mend any “broken bridges”? Would we hurry to tell someone “I’m sorry”? Would we be here in church more often? Would some of our priorities change? Jesus tells us, we know not the day or the hour, so perhaps we should do some of those things now. We’ve been warned. The choice is ours. Are we prepared?